by Nina Stibbe
‘He’s never off duty, though,’ said Mrs Woodward. ‘Like God.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said my mother, pouring herself a glass of Bull’s Blood.
My father arrived next and Tammy made a beeline for him and held him hostage in a corner for at least ten minutes. I heard numerous mentions of Massachusetts and New England and guessed Tammy must be recommending me for the sabbatical, and I regretted not being a better friend to her–and then dragged him over to meet JP who was being unbearable about people on state benefits wasting taxpayers’ money on frozen convenience foods. I watched to see if JP tried a funny handshake but the doorbell went again and I looked away at the crucial moment. Melody trotted down and came back with Abe in jodhpurs and a cravat, bearing a most attractive basket of grapes. He went straight over to Bill Turner and I think they might have done a funny handshake.
And then Andy walked in with a bottle of posh fruit juice and told me it was just for me and no one else, and kissed me on the cheek. Then my mother appeared and asked what my father was doing here.
My sister overheard this and said, ‘He’s here because he’s Lizzie’s father, a man you chose to marry and have three children with, and we’re sorry it’s so inconvenient and you now hate his guts, but we didn’t fucking choose him.’
My mother tutted and turned to me. ‘What’s he doing here?’ she repeated.
‘He’s just a lure. JP thinks he can help get him into the Freemasons.’
‘But your father’s not a Mason.’
‘I know that, but JP doesn’t.’
My mother was very upset with my father. They got along all right on the rare occasions they encountered one another–at a wedding, say. But recently my father had done something to cause my mother great anguish.
It had been agreed that Jack mustn’t get a motorbike of any kind. Not because they were so dangerous, though they were, but because Jack wasn’t suited to that kind of risk. However, around that time he suddenly seemed keen to buy a moped from a kid in the village. It was my mother’s opinion that Jack was counting on her to forbid it. Andy also tried to put him off.
‘I couldn’t have ridden round these roads aged sixteen or seventeen,’ he said, in support of my mother.
Jack didn’t care what they said. He emptied his building society account and, finding himself short, telephoned our father to ask for a loan. Our father agreed to send him a cheque and he was soon the proud owner of a Suzuki AP50. He drove it home and parked it on the pavement in front of my mother’s house. I wasn’t there at the time, but Andy was. And this is approximately what happened.
My mother rushed outside, distraught.
‘How did you pay for it?’ she asked.
When Jack told her, she stared at him in disbelief.
‘Your father?’
‘But he says I’m never to go over to his house on it,’ Jack told her.
‘Why not?’ asked my mother.
‘He doesn’t want Benjamin to see it.’
‘And do you understand why he doesn’t want Benjamin to see it?’ my mother asked.
‘Not really.’
‘He doesn’t want Benjamin to see it because he can’t bear the thought of him wanting one at your age because the roads are dangerous and it’s so young, and he’ll be so vulnerable,’ she said. ‘He can’t bear the thought.’
Jack went inside, but my mother stood out there in silence, looking at the moped and thinking. Then she telephoned my father. No one thought to eavesdrop.
The party meal went well, I must say; it was quite picnicky due to the number of people and the tininess of the dining table. Tammy’s mince-and-aubergine bake (moussaka) with green salad and vinaigrette went head to head with my spaghetti ring and chopped-egg flan (Crosse & Blackwell recipe featured in Woman’s Own which was nicer than it sounds) and came out an easy winner. Priti’s bread was much remarked upon and then eaten entirely by Abe, who kept dipping it in everything.
Pudding was Marguerite Patten’s Angel Whispers with raspberry jam (a triumph), and the thing my mother brought, which was basically blancmange. Afterwards I served real filter coffee in the tiny cups Granny Benson had given me, and JP filled the air with smoke from a slim panatella. It was strange seeing him smoke it himself–not being fed. He was all over it, sucking it and twirling the end in his lips, throwing his head back to exhale. It was like seeing a captive hyena enjoying the leg of a tiny, dead antelope. I looked away.
‘Is someone writing a book?’ shouted Bill Turner, patting the manuscript my mother had left in full view on the sideboard.
‘Ooh, yes, how’s the book going?’ someone else asked.
‘Oh, do read us a bit,’ said Tammy.
My sister felt it probably wasn’t a good time and why didn’t we play Mountain River or charades instead but Tammy was tipsy and excited–and thought she might be in it.
And Mrs Woodward joined in. ‘Oh, yes, do read some of your novel,’ she said, with real enthusiasm. ‘I’ve heard so much about it from Lizzie.’
‘She writes it here, in my waiting room,’ JP boasted.
My mother leafed through her papers, coughed and set the scene.
‘So, it’s 2024,’ she began. ‘Calipastra and Jim, a married couple, have taken a young, male apprentice, Stefan, to live with them. Calipastra has managed to coax Stefan into teaching her to drive–along the forest tracks. But it is illegal for women to drive without a husband or father in the car, so they are taking a huge risk…’ Then she began reading.
The party listened intently to Stefan teaching Calipastra the basics of driving, and Calipastra seducing the apprentice as he stands contrapposto beside the huge car, taking his lower lip softly between her teeth, pushing him gently backwards on to the bonnet of the car, etc.… Then, the apprentice experiencing a number of troubling incidents in which his life is in danger and telling Calipastra, ‘I think someone wants to decommission me.’ Then the apprentice, having been fatally run over, lying at the side of the road, Calipastra reaching him just in time to see steam and sparks coming from his ears, and hear garbled nonsense and robot noises from his mouth (which is actually a speaker grille). And him conking out.
‘You see,’ my mother pronounced with great solemnity, ‘Stefan was a robot.’
Mrs Woodward gasped. ‘Is it autobiographical?’
‘Of course it’s not,’ said my mother. ‘It’s set in the future, and Stefan’s a robot.’
‘It’s brilliant,’ said Melody. ‘I love it.’
‘Oh, my gosh, it’s so moving,’ said Tammy, in tipsy tears. ‘It’s like you and Andy Nicolello.’
My mother and I looked at each other.
‘But where’s the science?’ asked JP. ‘I could hear all the fiction but no science.’
‘Are you caught in a temporal loop?’ Tammy wondered, and I was proud of her for such a notion.
‘No,’ said my mother, ‘it’s probably more relevant to say it’s a satirical commentary on the patriarchal trend from the vantage point of the future.’
The party chattered on about fiction, science fiction and so forth, and my mother particularly gave her thoughts on the flaws of civilization. I think she’d taken some kind of pill to bring out her creativity because she was talking most poetically, like Doris Lessing on the radio, or a crazy person in the park.
Tammy and JP sat closely together and Angelo had his head on Tammy’s leg. And it really was like Sali Cortion’s dinner, with the odd assortment getting on famously and everything just so, but just as I was thinking it Melody, who’d gone into my bedroom to adjust her eye make-up after tears of mirth, reappeared heaving a great square thing and saying, ‘Oh my God, this is brilliant, who painted this?’
I leapt up, but too late, and she stood in the doorway, holding the painting out to face the party and, peering at the information on the back of the canvas, read, ‘Tammy with Fawn–1980’.
Tammy in the portrait now had blacked-out front teeth and heavy spectacles. She was pregnant
(with the fawn). The fawn seemed to have an erect penis and to have been stabbed with a dagger. A pretty black lace-effect border ran all around.
No one spoke for a moment until Mrs Woodward said, ‘Is it Dadaism?’
Tammy hid her face and rocked with laughter or weeping, or both, but probably laughter.
And Bill said, ‘Thank goodness Jossy’s not here to see that.’
‘What is it?’ various people asked and my mother explained.
‘Husband –’ pointing at JP–‘presents wife with a portrait he’s commissioned, the result so deeply chauvinistic and patronizing it provokes an uncharacteristically violent response in previously docile spouse.’
‘Spouse!’ said Tammy, giggling.
‘Hang on!’ said Bill Turner. ‘Jossy did a pretty good job considering JP knocked her down to twenty quid.’
‘I wish I’d stuck to my original offer–a free scale and polish,’ said JP.
‘It’s worth more than thirty quid now,’ observed Melody.
Tammy and JP left together, which was a triumph and a huge relief, particularly considering the appearance of the defaced painting. JP didn’t seem to care, just as long as he’d got Tammy back. On the way out he said, ‘Thank you for a delightful evening, nurse,’ and told me not to bin the portrait because he was going to salvage the frame.
The Woodwards went home next, saying how much they’d enjoyed the evening too, especially the reading. Soon there was only Priti and me left.
‘You must be so proud–your mother is such a great writer,’ she said.
‘She is, actually.’
‘I hope she gets the book published.’
‘It’s unlikely.’
‘I can’t wait to read the whole thing.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic.’
‘The thing is,’ I told her, ‘my mum is teaching Andy to drive at the moment, and he’s living at her house, so it all feels a bit–odd.’
‘Oh,’ said Priti, and she looked up, like someone trying to imagine something.
The party had been a success in that Tammy had gone back to Blackberry Lane and it was just me in the flat. I still didn’t know how things stood with Andy and me, and found myself pining for him one minute, and furious and suspicious of my mother the next, and then suffering great queasiness about it all.
Late one afternoon after the surgery had closed, when all this was going through my mind, Andy called in unexpectedly. He’d enjoyed the dinner party, he said; he’d liked meeting my father, he’d heard from JP we were having trouble with the aquarium, and he’d been quite stunned by the unveiling of Tammy’s portrait, having seen it before it had been altered.
‘What a party!’ he said.
‘Yes, but it was a success overall.’
Then, quite abruptly, he asked me what I thought was going on.
‘What do you think is going on?’ he said, looking very serious.
Assuming he meant in our relationship and, glad for the opportunity to thrash it all out, I said, ‘Well, since you ask, I feel uncomfortable about the driving lessons, especially hearing that new chapter of my mother’s novel.’
‘Umm, I’m talking about the aquarium,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I see.’ And we switched subject immediately and discussed the shock-absorbing pads to go underneath the tank, the slam-proof door-closing mechanism that Mr Skidmore was about to fit, and the new DO NOT TAP ON THE GLASS sign, official looking and less likely to be ignored, so that Tammy’s desk could come back into the surgery. And that was that.
Andy was reminded of the Babel fish from his favourite book and how it simultaneously proved the existence and the non-existence of God. And because he showed no inclination to return to the other subject, which I had now clearly flagged as ‘troubling me’, I told him I was busy and said goodbye without even going up into the flat or having so much as a peck on the cheek.
After he was gone, I thought about the Babel fish and how perfect it was for Reverend Woodward, and took the extraordinary step of phoning the vicarage. Mrs Woodward answered and I didn’t dare say I wanted to speak to her husband in case she thought we were embroiled. So I pretended to want to check the time of our next lesson, and brought up the main point of my call as an afterthought.
‘Oh, and by the way, please tell Reverend Woodward to remind me to tell him about the Babel fish,’ I said. ‘It simultaneously proves the existence and the non-existence of God.’
‘Goodness gracious,’ said Mrs Woodward, ‘isn’t it clever.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you got one in your aquarium?’
21. The Prolapse and the Honeysuckle
A few weeks after the dinner party I received an unusual phone call from Mr Holt. Unusual because he never used the phone. His voice sounded a bit strangled when he explained that my mother had had a prolapse and the doctor had referred her to the infirmary for an operation. ‘The Fothergill repair,’ he told me.
We’d all had our times at Leicester Royal Infirmary. My mother for some of her babies, miscarriages, varicose veins, and a car crash so ridiculous it looked deliberate, though it definitely wasn’t. There was my fractured pelvis, the strange psychosomatic paralysis that affected my sister’s wrist and shoulder joints after a mental breakdown on a North Devon camping holiday, Little Jack’s hearing test–after we suddenly realized he couldn’t hear with his eyes shut–the birth of baby Danny, and the death of a patient called Miss Emma Mills which I’d accidentally caused during my time as an auxiliary nurse. There was also Mr Holt’s broken foot, which he denied was broken so as not to make a fuss and because of the times before the NHS when he couldn’t breathe due to asthma and his mother would beg him not to need the doctor when he was actually suffocating, because of the cost.
The word ‘prolapse’ sounded like water lapping at the edge of an old stone pool rather than the grim thing it actually was, and we bandied it around. We all enjoyed saying it. Its effect was better than cursing.
‘My mother’s had a prolapse,’ one of us might say to the post lady for no reason other than to see her horrified face.
‘Tell him I’ve had a fucking prolapse,’ my mother might say when a neighbour called round to ask if we’d mind moving a vehicle from outside their house. And thinking she’d detected a sigh or a tut, she would invite him inside to have a look.
‘My mother’s had a prolapsed uterus,’ I told Tammy, to explain why I needed a few days off work.
Tammy resented my mother having the prolapse because, A) it added another tiny cloud to the horizon of femaleness, and B) it meant she’d have to assist JP alone without me to chat to, because I’d need some time off work.
‘Oh, my goodness, whatever caused it?’ she asked.
The prolapsed uterus was a straightforward consequence of having so many children and pushing them out too quickly and not leaving gaps between pushes and, in addition, suffering with the Benson bowel, which meant straining on the toilet every few days.
‘Straining on the toilet mostly,’ I told Tammy, to keep it simple, not being quite sure of Tammy’s baby/fertility situation, and not wanting to stray into the childbirth arena.
‘Silver lining though,’ she said. ‘It’ll put Andy off.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, horrified, but having already thought that exact thing.
‘No, I just mean she won’t seem such a superwoman now with her female organs hanging out.’
‘Oh. I see,’ I said.
There was a few days’ wait for the surgical repair and my mother wasn’t allowed to do much except drink orange juice and eat laxative powders. She concentrated on the novel and managed to crowbar a compromised uterus into the plot. And then she was admitted to the Leicester Royal Infirmary and operated on the next day. It was such a gloriously bright day that I felt sure she’d die under the anaesthetic, or die of blood loss or the surgeon sneezing at the wrong moment and severing an important vein that couldn�
�t be fixed.
I imagined that, if the worst happened, I could bring Danny up as my own. I’d make him forget the past and call me Mother and that way I’d be accepted by society without having to go through with actual childbirth and risk having a child who was scared of water or dogs or didn’t like music or stayed awake at night, or had long arms and could reach out from its pram. I’d seen a baby like this in Fenwick’s, literally grabbing things off the shelves. ‘He always does that,’ said the mother. ‘He’s got extra-long arms.’
Then there were April Jickson’s twins–I can’t remember their real names, because she always called them Thing One and Thing Two–for whom I’d babysat a few times after her husband had suffered a life-changing accident in Rimini. Thing One was quite sweet and normal, but Thing Two, my God, he was a real fusspot, and yet they were biological twins. Thing One would tuck into his fish-finger igloo with nothing but praise and admiration (‘Look, Lizzie made an igloo’) whereas Thing Two would angrily want to know why I’d fooled around with his food and would dig at the mashed potato dome with his kiddy-fork looking for his fish fingers, and the only song he’d allow was ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ by the Carpenters, and that’s not a song you can take more than once or twice.
I once reported Thing Two to April. ‘He’s a bit fussy, isn’t he?’ I’d said.
‘Tell me about it!’ said April. ‘He can be a right little cunt.’
I’ve never forgotten that moment, the terrifying realization that you have no control over what kind of baby you produce–you might get Danny, but then again, you might get Thing Two or that baby with the long arms.
Thing One and Thing Two were a good reminder to think jolly hard before having babies if you like your current life. April’s life had been pretty much perfect, according to her, without them. She’d been on friendly terms with Lynsey de Paul, Alvin Stardust and Liza Goddard before the twins came along and put paid to her trips to London for gadding about.
Luckily, in spite of all the tiny signs that my mother would die–the honeysuckle coming out early, the radio playing ‘Imagine’ (there’s no heaven) followed by ‘Seasons in the Sun’, a patient telling us his wife had died ‘in theatre’, and the sandwich of the week at the Lunch Box being ‘vache morte et moutarde’–the operation went well and she was ready to go home a couple of days later.
